I'll Never Be French (no matter what I do)

by Mark Greenside

  I get in a line for crêpes to go. Brits, Germans, and Americans are ahead of me, people who excel at lining up, so the line moves quickly. “Beurre et sucre,” I say to myself, rehearsing as I wait my turn, “Beurre et sucre,” and search my pockets for the correct change. The girl behind the counter may look a kindly fifteen, but to me she’s Marie Antoinette.

  “Beurre et sucre,” I say when I reach the counter.

  “Butter and sugar,” she repeats, making sure we’ve both got it right. Then she spreads the thinnest layer of batter possible over a round, sizzling, butter-greased grill, waits a few seconds for the edges to become crispy and tan, flips it over, drops two more tablespoons of butter on it, sprinkles sugar, folds it in half, melts more butter, more sugar, folds it in fourths, and wraps it in wax paper and hands it to me. “Beurre et sucre,” she says.

  No kidding. I give her the money, step aside, bite into it, and burn the roof of my mouth. Butter drips over my hand and down my arm. I gobble it as fast as I can, then lick my fingers, hand, and arm like a cat cleaning his paws. There’s no way to eat this without making a mess, and they don’t give you a napkin. For a people crazed by cleanliness…I get it! This isn’t about my cleanliness, or even France’s—that’s my business and France’s. This is about the crêpe lady’s expenses. Napkins cost money, and she’ll be damned if she’s going to pay her money to keep me (and France) clean. It’s Milton Friedman market-based economy to the core, and the reason I can’t get ice cubes, decent toilet paper, towels, soap, or shampoo in hotels. If I want those conveniences, I should bring them. I wipe my hands on my pants and wait.

  At three o’clock, the church doors open. It’s a good thing, because half the crowd is ready to faint. The sun ricocheting off the granite is causing sunspots and increasing the already hot temperature several degrees. A gray-haired priest in a forest-green robe steps through the doors carrying a huge silver staff with a gold Jesus stretched on the cross.

  The priest is surrounded by young boys in white, swinging censers. He says something in Breton, another language I don’t understand, then walks down the stairs and enters the crowd, which has grown to thousands, as the French have quit eating and joined the group.

  Following the priest are more young boys in white, other priests, acolytes, and guys in suits, probably the mayor and other politicos, and following them are the villagers. It looks like a Happening, Sergeant Pepper reprised: men with Abe Lincoln beards and sideburns to rival Elvis’s, wearing Amish-like hats and brightly embroidered vests with jackets and waistcoats embroidered to match, wide breeches and striped pantaloons, and thick leather belts or colorful sashes as cummerbunds; women wearing lace hats of varying heights, widths, curls, flips, flaps, twists, bends, and stitches to indicate what village they’re from. (It’s the semiotics of the Middle Ages. No wonder Derrida is French.) Blouses are embroidered in phosphorescent orange, black, white, reds, and blues, often all on the same person, with a complementing skirt, jacket, and an apronlike piece of cloth over everything—and everything is edged with lace. The children are wearing miniature versions of the same.

  Hundreds of people exit the church and march around the square, which is so crowded it’s a miracle anyone can move, especially now, with the people emerging from the church carrying heavy, hulky, bulky, unbalanced, barely manageable, large and small pieces of church reliquary and dozens of colorful banners for Saint Ronan (the patron saint of Locronan), Mary, Anne, Margaret, as well as the bier of Saint Ronan; a giant cross; everything, it seems, except the altar, pews, and organ. It’s ingenious. I’ve got to hand it to those Catholics. What better test of faith, belief, rectitude, and submission than to march around town carrying hernia-inducing reliquary in ninety-degree heat, wearing dark, heavy clothes in July?

  The priest begins to sing. Everyone in the procession joins him. They seem to be marching in groups—Our Ladies for Mary, Men for Saint Joseph, Our Ladies of Good News—but I can’t tell. The procession is huge and long, hundreds of people, with thousands of others lining the way, watching as they pass by. It’s the first time I’ve seen French people form a straight line. They march. They stop. They sing. They march. The rear can’t see the front. The front can’t see the rear. They’re following the path of Saint Ronan, an Irish hermit who lived and preached in Locronan in the fifth century. Lucky for the kids and the people carrying the reliquary, this is a Petite Troménie, only three or four kilometers (about two miles) to the chapel on top of the hill, not the Grande Troménie, which happens once every six years and requires circling the entire village, walking through the surrounding woods and up the hill for twelve kilometers. It happens once every six years because it takes five years to recuperate. To prove the point, an old guy, one of six carrying a larger-than-life-size wooden saint, mutters to his buddy, “C’est plus mauvais que la guerre.” It’s worse than the war.

  Two hours into the march people are sweating and breathing hard. Many have produced bottles of water from somewhere in their garb, but as far as I can see nobody has quit or dropped out. Amazing as that is, two other things amaze me more. One, there are no police. I mention this later to Sharon and Jean, and they shake their heads in dismay. “They’re there,” Sharon says. “You don’t see them,” Jean adds. I don’t know if they’re right or paranoid or both, or if French police have the best PR in the world: French people think they’re everywhere, so in reality they don’t have to be anywhere. It’s a mystery I’ve yet to solve. All I know is, if an entire village were on the march in the U.S., the police would make a point of being visible. But that observation is nothing compared to the second one: teenagers are here. Willingly, smilingly walking with their family, holding hands with siblings and parents, not sulking or being dragged by the hair. I haven’t seen anything like it since Father Knows Best went off the air.

  It takes three hours to reach the chapel. Given the heat and the clothes and the stopping, singing, praying, marching, and handing off of reliquary from carrier to carrier like a relay, it’s not bad.

  I bring up the rear, as I seem to do a lot here. I turn the final bend and see the chapel—the chapel I thought was the goal, the purpose, our destiny. I must be the only one who thought so, because not a single person is there, including the priests and the suits. They are wedged up to a makeshift bar drinking beer, hard cider, and Breton whiskey. Other people stand in front of the stage waiting for the band—drums, oboe, bagpipe, and accordion. Boys and girls play peacefully with each other. There’s no pushing, shoving, teasing, or taunting. The teenagers are smoking, the men and women drinking beer, all in full costume, nobody rushing home to change clothes or watch TV. The band starts to play and people hold hands and form circles, and circles within circles within circles, and everyone begins bouncing up and down like yo-yos, which I guess to them is dancing. It’s part religion, part tradition, part myth, and part civic duty—and all the parts seem to fit together, at least for today.

  It reminds me of July Fourth and the small town I grew up in in the 1950s, and I wonder what in the world would get me to join and enjoy something so hokey in the U.S. today? I look for fissures, breaks, anything disruptive, disjointive, forced, out of place, and for the life of me I can’t see it. For the moment I even feel as if I fit in. I came to Locronan prepared to mock the seriousness of what couldn’t be serious and the hypocrisy of acting like it is. I leave with the joy of seeing and being part of this communal experience. Either I’m fooling myself, or Brittany is fooling me. Either way, it works.

  I don’t know if I’ve been pardoned or not; I didn’t pray or sing. But Madame P is happy I went, and that’s enough for me. She rewards me with a smile, the double-cheek kiss, and a pudding dessert. Far Breton, she calls it. I call it far out. Who would have guessed you could make anything that good with prunes? Talk about a miracle!

  Fête Nautique

  On my way to buy bread one morning I see a sign in Place Charles de Gaulle: Fête Nautique. Nautical fete. I know what that means: boats. Beneath,
it says feu d’artifice.

  I ask Monsieur P, “Qu’est-ce que c’est, feu d’artifice?”

  He looks up in the sky, raises his arms straight over his head, and brings them down on either side of him in a woosh, saying, “Booom.”

  I think he’s telling me again about the munitions factory in a nearby town that blew up during the revolution. What that has to do with fête nautique I don’t know, but I also don’t know how to ask.

  That was on a Monday.

  On the Friday of the weekend of the fête I drive into Loscoat and see a camel tied to the fence along the quay. No one but me seems to find this interesting or odd, which is interesting in itself, because in my brief experience here, people are curious about everything. Everything except this camel, which probably means it’s not new, unexpected, or a surprise, though it’s the first time I’ve seen a camel in town.

  I drive back to Plobien to tell Monsieur P and get stuck in a traffic jam of Mercedes vans and trailers. I follow them as far as Chez Sally and watch as they stop, pull over, and park in front of the church and mairie.

  Monsieur P is sitting in a chair in his driveway, sunbathing. I tell him about the camel, or try to, then give up. Instead, I point to the vans and trailers and say, “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  “Pour la fête.”

  “Ah. Oui.” I haven’t a clue.

  That evening, after dinner, I take my usual stroll along the river road to the viaduct, but I don’t make it past the village square. Place Charles de Gaulle has been turned into a small-town suburban carnival. In front of the church and mairie are a tiny Ferris wheel and merry-go-round for little kids, bumper cars for bigger kids, and at least a dozen sideshows for everyone—shoot the duck, catch the fish, hook the cow, hoop the pig, eat the sausage, nuts, nougat, cotton candy, pastry, and have a beer—and the whole place is practically empty. It’s as if they’re having a party and no one comes. It’s sad, actually, so I buy a stick of blue cotton candy and shoot some ducks to make the concessionaires happy and give them hope.

  Saturday is also quiet. Activity picks up a little at night with a few teens, but basically it’s dead. I have no idea how these people stay in business. It’s one of the sorriest sights I’ve seen: a sad, empty, lonely fair, enough to make a Toulouse-Lautrec look cheerful.

  Sunday is more of the same. Actually, it’s a little worse because not even the teens are there. They prefer the bench at the bus stop to the fair. No one is interested. I’m getting depressed. Monday is fête night and this little town—my little town (I tend to take things personally)—is going to throw a party and no one is going to come. These poor people. How do they afford those Mercedes? It’s another example of French capitalism that makes no sense to me.

  Monday morning I see men on the other side of the river, a first. All I’ve seen so far are cows and horses. They walk around the ruins of what I thought was a château and find out later was a prison built by Napoleon, banging things into the ground and leaving tiny black boxes behind them. It looks like some kind of secret commando operation. Maybe it is a secret commando operation, and daylight is their cover. This is what happens when I don’t know what’s going on: I become paranoid.

  In the afternoon, I’m startled out of sleepy oblivion by Mick Jagger screaming, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” It’s at a brain-piercing decibel level. All afternoon, without warning or discernible pattern, Mick blasts his way through town, drowning out traffic, church bells, and thought, breaking through doors, windows, and three-foot-thick stone walls.

  At seven o’clock I go outside to look around. A few people are straggling about, but no more than usual. Basically, the village is empty. The concessionaires are eating their own wares. I don’t know if that’s good or not—it’s so good they’re eating it, or no one else is going to eat it, so they might as well. On my way back to Chez Sally I watch three guys open a couple of tables and barricade the road. Either the revolution has come and it’s beginning in Plobien or they’re going to charge to get into town. Neither one makes any sense. Who’s going to pay? Who’s even going to be here? It’s frustrating understanding so little.

  Kathryn and I walk next door to Monsieur and Madame P’s, where we’re invited for dinner. I expect a full house, the whole family, because the family is the basic social unit in France, not me, me, me, which is difficult for an American to understand, until it’s not about me and then it’s easy.

  Philippe, Estelle, their young boy and girl, Deniel and Annick, Henri, and his girlfriend, Renée, are there. So are Monsieur Jacques, an elf of a man with a leprechaun smile, the owner of a huge construction company; Monsieur Robert, a man with arms like oxygen tanks, who, according to Henri, makes the best lambig (whiskey) and venison pâté in Finistère; and Monsieur Charles, the egg man, who lives with forty hens, two roasters, four pigs, a goat, and a dog. I sit between Philippe and Henri. It’s my only chance to understand a thing.

  The evening starts with sitting in the living room and drinking apéritifs for an hour: peach kir, strawberry kir, cherry, blackberry, raspberry kir, kir Breton with cider, kir royale with champagne, and for the more adventurous, Monsieur Robert’s lambig, which could strip paint from a table and six chairs in ten minutes. There’s juice and water for the kids.

  Through the window, I see a few people walking into town. “How many people do you think will be here tonight?” I ask Philippe.

  “Three or four thousand.”

  “Thousand?” I think he’s using the old numbers the way everyone else does, even though the “new” numbers have been in effect for twenty years, and he really means 4 or 40 or 400. “The village has only five hundred people.”

  He shrugs. “Normal.”

  We sit down to dinner at eight o’clock, thirteen of us and the dog. I’m halfway looped. Kathryn is three-quarters. The meal, like most meals, begins with melon. That’s what it’s called, melon. It looks like cantaloupe but is smaller and sweeter. Madame serves each adult three huge slices, and we’re off to another French meal. Melon is followed by crudité, a salad of red lettuce from her garden, eggs from Monsieur Charles, and tomatoes from the market—hers won’t be ready until August—with lots of fresh bread and mounds of butter and an endless supply of rosé. After the crudité, she serves generous slices of pink ham garnished with cornichons, mustard, homemade mayonnaise, and more fresh bread and butter and white wine. Thank God, I think, a light meal, and help myself to several moist slices of jambon supérieur. Meanwhile, families are arriving carrying chairs, umbrellas, bottles of water, backpacks, fanny packs, children, and dogs. Two women carry cats. For all I know there are also rabbits, chickens, and baby pigs. When French people aren’t eating their animals, they love them.

  By 9:30, I’m bursting and ready to go outside. That’s when Madame brings the main course—three platters, each the size of a Cadillac hubcap, dripping with browned, already cut-up, covered in their own juices, chickens from Monsieur Charles, two bowls of rice, and potatoes and green beans from her garden, with more butter and bread. Chicken is the sign for Monsieur P to open the red.

  By 10:30, we’ve gone through five bottles of red, two white, two rosé, a few glasses of lambig, several loaves of bread, a half kilo of butter, and most of the chicken, rice, potatoes, and green beans. No one can move. At least, the men can’t. Madame, Renée, and Estelle clear the table. Monsieur Jacques groans. The women return with clean plates and silverware, two bowls of butter lettuce from Madame’s garden, more bread, and a half dozen different cheeses. Monsieur Jacques groans louder. I don’t have the strength to do that. I slump in my chair and look at the kids.

  Deniel is six and Annick is four, and they’re sitting through the meal like adults. They talk to the adults. They talk like adults. Adults talk to them like adults. They’re dressed like adults. No one speaks baby talk to them, no one yells at them, and absolutely no one spanks, embarrasses, teases, or humiliates them. They are corrected with a look, a touch, a word—arrête, doucement, non, éco
ute—and they do. In the U.S., these kids would be at a separate table, a separate room, maybe even a separate house or village, eating a separate meal. They’d either be watching TV or demanding something they shouldn’t have and wouldn’t get, except maybe tonight because they can hold their parents hostage in front of their friends. Not French kids. French parents treat their kids like adults, knowing they’re children and they’ll lapse. American parents treat their kids like babies and get short with them when they don’t act grown up. One of the saddest sights I’ve seen is American parents bringing their two-year-olds to the movies and getting upset when the babies begin to cry. I remember how well behaved the French kids were on the flight to France and the train ride to Brest, and Yann and Noé, Sharon and Jean’s teenage boys, coming out of their room to greet us, and the teenagers at Locronan, and the cafés and restaurants filled with multigenerational diners. Children of all ages with their parents, everywhere, like tonight, fête night, families outside and family inside, even future family with Renée, everyone doing their part—and everyone has one.

  Monsieur opens the wine and tastes it, a job he takes so seriously he’s already turned down two bottles of his own as too young. Madame prepares the meal, and she, Estelle, and Renée serve it and clear the table. Deniel and Annick try to act like adults, and for the most part succeed. Even the dog is on his best behavior, staying under the table the entire meal. All roles and behavior are prescribed. Everyone knows his or her place, has one and wants one. The only person resisting is me. I was trained to help clean up after dinner. Every girlfriend I’ve had has insisted—no matter what I do—that I do more. Yet when I stand to help, I’m told to sit down. When I try to stack plates, I’m told to stop. I’m the guest, l’invité, and invités are not expected to do anything except indulge. That’s my role. It’s all a little bit retro, like fifties TV sit-coms, Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver, with the zaniness of I Love Lucy tossed in. Doctors make home visits here, milk comes in bottles, kids listen, and fresh food isn’t packaged in cellophane. It all feels very familiar to me, though, of course, it’s not.